The Secret Life of Josephine: Napoleon's Bird of Paradise

by Carolly Erickson

  “The Chinese may balk at being ruled by a Corsican,” I said with a smile. “They have their own emperor, if I am not mistaken.”

  “And don’t forget India. The general would have his hands full defeating the British there. It all reminds me,” Donovan went on, “of an old poem I heard recited once, about love, and sitting and finding rubies beside the Ganges, and wooing that goes on forever—if only there were world enough and time.”

  I hugged him.

  “Only now it is fighting that seems to go on forever,” I said at length.

  “Not forever. As a matter of fact, there are a number of French generals who are conspiring against Bonaparte even as we speak.” “Which generals?”

  “It is better that you not know any names. But they are active. They are working secretly to undermine Bonaparte’s authority with the soldiers. They call him tyrant. They refer to him as The Sultan.’ Even members of his own family are listening to the dissidents.”

  “What?”

  Donovan nodded. “Including your old enemy Joseph.” “I can’t believe it.”

  “It is true. They say Bonaparte is looking for a way to reassure Joseph and retain his loyalty.”

  I had been pondering politics; now I was confronted with one of its murkier aspects: the problem of assuring loyalty.

  “Bonaparte retains his position through fear. But with family, fear is not the strongest motivator. There has to be a bond of blood, a bond so deep nothing can destroy it.”

  “I always thought the Buonapartes were inseparable, that they would stand together, no matter what.”

  “Joseph can be lured away. He is envious of his younger brother’s success and this envy leads to rivalry and malice.”

  Our long beautiful night together gave way at last to the earliest pink light of dawn. Donovan dressed quickly in his disguise, slipping into the shabby clothes and black hat of the legless veteran, spreading a thin layer of grey ash on his face to make himself look older and unhealthy and pulling his hair down across his forehead to make it look unkempt.

  Christian arrived to help him onto the small wheeled platform that was his usual way of getting around, and to lift his bags. A cart waited at the edge of the wood to carry him to Dieppe where arrangements had been made for him to cross by fishing boat to England. From there he would join the expedition to Portugal.

  We embraced fervently one last time. I kissed his ash-covered cheek.

  “If only you could stay!” I could not prevent myself from saying.

  “I have never been good at anything but being a soldier, Yeyette. That is what I have to offer. I offer it gladly—only with a divided heart, for part of me stays here, with you.”

  “And part of me goes with you, my own dearest Donovan.”

  He trundled off in the murky dawn light, along the path that led around the lake and into the thick stand of trees, an unobtrusive, pitiable figure in his worn uniform, just another casualty of the wars, a legless veteran doing his best to sustain life in perilous times.

  49

  MY BELOVED OLDEST GRANDSON CARLO lay on the little bed I prepared for him at Malmaison, a bed fit for a royal child with gilded eagles at its head and foot. Sweat poured from his fair hair down his forehead and into his eyes, and his sweet face was flushed red with fever, yet he smiled at me when I bathed his forehead with a wet cloth and smoothed back his wet hair.

  He had been very ill for nearly a week. As soon as I got Hortense’s message from The Hague saying Carlo was ill I ordered the swiftest, lightest carriage from the imperial stables and rushed to Holland to get her and the boy. Her husband Louis had been behaving very oddly, Hortense said, and she needed to get herself and Carlo away from him as soon as possible.

  Louis, she told me, had taken to shutting himself in a dark room for days on end to work on his forever unfinished stories, refusing to see a doctor about his own worsening sickness and forbidding any doctor to visit his ailing son. Her contempt for him was evident in her words. She described her husband as a walking pustule, covered in weeping sores, unsteady on his painful legs, his vision growing weak and his temper becoming ever more menacing. Most striking of all, she said, was his complete and unswerving attention to his stories. Nothing else mattered, she told me, not his health or the health of their son, not his

  kingdom, certainly not his marriage. All he wanted was to seek solitude, to be left alone to write.

  Carlo began coughing, and couldn’t seem to stop. Hortense and I helped him to sit up. We patted his back, spoke soothingly to him, gave him tea with honey to drink—knowing, all the time, that nothing was helping him and that he was getting worse. Each time he coughed he spat up blood, and with it, a thick greenish fluid that stank horribly.

  I sent for the physician who had helped me after my terrible fall in Plombieres, Dr. Morel. His manner was comforting, though I remembered very well how ineffectual his methods had been when I was in such agony after my fall. He looked considerably older than he had in Plombieres, stouter and more red in the face.

  “Your Royal Highnesses,” he said when he arrived at Malmaison, bowing to each of us in turn, then going immediately to little Carlo’s bedside.

  “Has the boy been bled?” he asked, honorifics forgotten in the intensity of his concern for his small patient.

  “Yes,” Hortense answered. “I opened a vein myself as soon as he felt hot to the touch. I knew he had fever.”

  Hortense showed the physician the recent opening she had made in the crook of Carlo’s scarred little arm.

  “This vein has been opened before,” he said, scrutinizing the injury. “Many times before.”

  “Carlo has often been ill. His father does not allow any physicians in the palace. So I bleed Carlo myself. It is my belief,” she added, “that Carlo and his brother are often ill because they are near my husband, who grows more and more ill all the time.”

  The doctor looked up at Hortense. “What is the nature of his illness?”

  Hortense looked over at me, but I had no advice to offer her. No one in the Buonaparte family had ever admitted that Louis had the English disease, but it was obvious to everyone. The stigma attached to that disease was very great, the shame to the family enormous.

  “It is the disease no one wishes to name,” Hortense said bravely.

  “Ah. I understand. I have treated many patients with this unnamed disease. Tell me, does your husband find it hard to maintain his balance when he walks?”

  “Yes.”

  ‘And does he have a severe rash, with infected blisters?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded knowingly. “I suppose his sight is growing dim, and his temper very difficult?”

  “Your conjectures are accurate, doctor.”

  He put his hand on Carlo’s hot forehead. “How long has he had this fever?”

  “About nine days.”

  “Is he able to take any nourishment?”

  Hortense shook her head, and began to cry quietly.

  “Your Royal Highness, if it is any comfort to you, I do not believe your son has his father’s disease. That disease is confined to women of easy virtue and the men who visit them. It is incurable. Your husband will not live to be old.”

  “Doctor! Must you be so blunt? You see how upset my daughter is.”

  “Your Imperial Majesty, when dealing with disease it is always best to speak the truth. Not to disguise it behind lies, or make it more palatable by using false terms. The truth is the truth.”

  I was afraid that the doctor would blurt out the truth about Carlo: that he would not live. I felt certain of it, as certain as if I had told his fortune.

  My sorrow at this prospect was great, yet nowhere near as great as Hortense’s. Carlo was her favorite, her firstborn. I thought how terrible would be my pain if I lost Eugene. My dear Eugene, who had only recently married and presented me with a grandchild and namesake, little Josephine. I wore a lock of her baby hair near my heart.

  But I was wrong
about what Dr. Morel would say. After examining Carlo thoroughly, he drew a small packet from his bag and gave it to Hortense, telling her to mix the contents with watered wine and pour it slowly, drop by drop, into Carlo’s mouth.

  “It has a sweet taste, he will not reject it. But do not give it to him too quickly, or his stomach may not absorb it all.

  “I will return in the morning,” he said and then, with a bow, left us.

  We stayed by Carlo’s bed, now sitting together watching over him, now resting on sofas. Euphemia and Coco joined us, and kept vigil while we rested.

  Coco had grown into a lovely girl, with skin only slightly darker than Euphemia’s. She was maturing swiftly, her limbs lengthening, her face losing its childish plumpness. Though I had told her who her parents were she did not know the story in any detail, how my father’s liaison with Selene had upset the household in Martinique and how Selene had died during the slave rebellion. I told her only that our father had loved Selene and that she had been a beautiful woman. There seemed no need to add how disruptive Selene’s sultriness had been, or how manipulative she herself had been. Coco was not like her mother in that way, she was a more thoughtful, unselfish girl and it was like her to be concerned about Carlo, the cousin she loved.

  Dr. Morel returned in the morning as promised. He examined Carlo while Hortense and I sat nearby, waiting anxiously for his conclusions, watching his every move, scanning his face in an effort to read his grave expression.

  When he finished he came and joined us. He looked resigned, and Hortense gripped my hand apprehensively.

  “Dear ladies, I am going to speak to you now, not as physicians usually speak to royal persons, but as someone who has a high enough regard for you both to give you my honest views.

  “The boy is gravely ill.” Hortense stifled a sob. “There are efforts we can make, if you choose, with leeches and cupping and further bleeding, but if this boy were my son or grandson I would treat him with kindness and simply let him sleep his way quietly out of this world.”

  Tears spilled from my eyes as he went on. “I do not honestly believe that he can be brought back to health, only that he can be made to live a few more tortured days, in pain, his mind increasingly disordered. In the end it will not even comfort him that you are near. We will pray that God grants him health. But I recommend that we do nothing further ourselves to prolong his weak life.”

  Hortense released my hand and ran from the room.

  “I am going to leave these opiates with you,” the doctor said, taking several packets from his bag. “They will help him sleep. You know where to reach me if you should need my help again.”

  I managed to mumble my thanks as the doctor left but my heart was leaden with sorrow. I went to find Hortense and attempted to comfort her.

  It is hard for me now to remember all that happened in the next few days. I know that I made an effort to eat, and bathe, and to reply when the servants came to me for their daily instructions. I thought of sending for Louis but Hortense insisted that he would not come. With the help of

  Christian I managed to compose a dignified bulletin to appear in the court circular, announcing that Louis-Napoleon-Charles, grandson and namesake of the emperor, was in failing health. A swift rider was sent east to Warsaw, where Bonaparte was holding court, to inform him of the impending tragedy. But I knew that the message would not reach him in time.

  In the end there was nothing we could do but sit by Carlo’s bedside, watching as his life ebbed. We sang to him, lullabies and children’s songs, and Euphemia repeated prayers in the Ibo tongue. Coco diligently gave Carlo the soothing drug Dr. Morel had left with us, and felt his forehead from time to time, and changed his linen. I admired her devotion, and could not help noticing that she began coughing and that beads of perspiration were forming on her forehead and running down her cheeks.

  By the time Carlo’s funeral was held, Coco was burning with fever, and once again I summoned Dr. Morel.

  In those cruel days I suffered twice, once when my dear grandson was taken from me and again when Coco, the child I had brought into the world so many years before, followed him to the grave. Carlo was taken back to his father’s kingdom for burial, but Coco, my half-sister, who had never had a real name or a real home other than with me, I buried in the chapel at Malmaison, beneath a small stone monument that read simply “Beloved Child of the Islands.”

  50

  I WAS ON THE WAY OUT. The time had come. I could tell by the way I was treated by the courtiers, the way my principal lady of honor, the haughty former Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, elderly and contemptuous, showed her disdain for me with every swish of her heavy silk skirts, every scornful glance from under her sparse eyebrows. As though she were the real empress and I was only an imposter!

  She was much older than I, and we remembered each other from the days—so long ago now!—when I was a new bride just arrived from Martinique and Alexandre spent a great deal of time with her husband. I was then a gawky provincial, who spoke French with a thick Creole accent and had no education; I was awkward in society though it did not take me long to find my place within it.

  The former duchess, belonging to the old aristocracy and of much higher birth than I, looked down on me and was offended that I should be elevated to the rank of empress. Like everyone else at court, she knew that soon Bonaparte would divorce me and marry a princess, a woman of royal blood; I was no longer deserving of respect or honor.

  The duchess, and her haughty attitude, set the tone for all my ladies. They regarded me with disdain. They were lax in serving me, and attending on me. With Bonaparte away from court, in Poland and later in

  Spain and Austria, there was no one to reprimand the wayward servants and officials of my household.

  I was badly served and subjected to much unkindness, surrounded by people who despised me and could not wait to have me gone.

  At that time, given the extreme anxiety I felt, I even feared that I might be poisoned, so that Bonaparte as a widower could choose a royal bride. I had never, even for a minute, forgotten Joseph’s plot to kill me. (How could I forget it, when I still had chronic pain in my back and legs from my terrible fall?) Nothing would be easier than to slip some arsenic or other poison into my food. Italians were very good at that, everyone said. There would be no suspicion—at least not overtly expressed. To openly suggest that the empress had been poisoned would be treason, and no one wanted to be accused of treason, for the emperor was still sending traitors to the Seychelles Islands and they were never heard from again.

  Two Polish noblewomen visiting Paris brought back news from Warsaw—news of my husband’s liaison with a pretty blond eighteen-year-old named Marie Walewska.

  “But is she royal?” I wanted to know. “Does she have royal blood?”

  “No,” I was told. “She is a noblewoman, but she has no royal blood.”

  Ah, I thought. Then I am safe. He won’t marry her.

  “But they say he is very much in love with her, Your Imperial Highness,” the younger and prettier of the two Polish women said with a venomous smile. “And, as we have heard, it is his plan to take a new wife. One who can give him children.”

  “Children are a gift from God,” I said, as icily as I could. “And how many do you have?”

  “I—that is, well, at present—”

  “She has had only miscarriages, Your Imperial Highness,” the older noblewoman admitted, “but is still young enough to bear living children.”

  “If she hurries,” I said, looking her up and down as if to assess her age, and assessing it unfavorably.

  It was the sort of conversation I found myself in too often these days, an exchange of insults. I found such conversations more tedious than wounding, yet the longer Bonaparte stayed in Warsaw, and the more people gossiped about his liaison with the pretty young countess, the more tense I became.

  “She has a husband, to be sure,” the former Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld announced to the ladies of m
y suite, who were eager for every nuance of information about Madame Walewska, “but he is very old, over seventy And she is obtaining a separation from him.”

  “Oh?” I said. “Why only a separation? Why not a divorce?”

  “Divorce is not permitted in Catholic Poland,” was the arch reply.

  “But in France it is allowed, even though we too are Catholic.” There was a murmuring among my ladies—the inevitable response to any mention of divorce.

  The former duchess turned slightly toward me, with a swish of her skirts.

  “As Your Imperial Majesty is aware, the rights of the church are a matter on which His Holiness and our emperor have worked out a compromise.”

  “Like the compromise between the adulteress Madame Walewska and her conscience,” I snapped.

  A titter ran through the room, and several of my ladies hid their mouths behind their fans.

  “Adultery may not be the most suitable topic for discussion,” the former duchess said acidly. “May I suggest another?”

  “By all means, madame. What shall it be? Loyalty, perhaps? Kindliness? Avoidance of hurtful gossip?”

  But the subject of Bonaparte’s liaisons could not be suppressed, as it was bound to affect the entire imperial court when, one day, he found the woman he intended to marry and bade farewell to me. When that day came, and it could not be far off, my household would be dissolved and the new empress would choose who would serve her. Appointments would be lost and gained, status changed. In the meanwhile the news from Poland would be eagerly exchanged and endlessly discussed.

  But I, in the privacy of my interior apartments, had a secret no one knew: I had my letters from Donovan.

  They arrived in the most unlikely of guises. Sometimes there would be a silk lame gown delivered from a dressmaker, with an underskirt that had a hidden pocket filled with sheets of writing. Sometimes a basket of melons would arrive at the palace for me and in the lining of the basket I would find a note. My Russian wolfhound Mitka wore a wide collar with a pouch for carrying small packages; from time to time I found a letter inside the pouch. I never knew when I might receive a message, but they came frequently, and with each new message I felt a fresh surge of hope.